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Elizabeth Austin

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Stay Healthy – Everywhere!

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Stay healthy – even in Waiting Rooms!

Suggestions for smart patients, especially as flu season ramps up:

Doctors offices, just like hospitals, can be dangerous places. Be prepared when you have an appointment! (These suggestions apply to all public places, too!)

  • Use your own pen to sign in.
  • During flu season, consider taking a scarf or face mask with you. If germs are in the air, cover your nose and mouth.
  • If masks are provided, use them!
  • Take some bleach wipes with you to wipe down your chair arms, and surfaces others may have touched, in both the waiting and exam rooms. Remember everything others may have touched!
  • Ask the receptionists how often the waiting room and exam rooms are wiped down and cleaned. They may not know, and if they don’t, ask them to ask others. Then, ask the doctor the same question. Just asking the question puts them on notice, reminding them of how dangerous it can be. They should know! But they get busy and don’t stop to think about it.*
  • If you have children with you, wipe down any toys before use.
  • Use their sanitizer before you leave, or take your own to use as soon as you leave. 
  • Afterward, wash your hands as soon as you get the chance.

None of us can afford to get sick, and none of us want to get sick… so taking these simple steps is a small price to pay for protection. Do it for yourself, and especially do it for someone you might accompany to the doctor, someone who is at higher risk of getting sick, especially an elderly person, a baby, or someone with a compromised immune system.

 

The Four Levels of Being

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Years ago, Dr. Jean Houston introduced me to the Four Levels. The Four Levels concept has become the single most useful framework in my personal growth as well as in my work as a coach and patient advocate.

Decades of research have found that all human beings contain inner realms of great range, variety and depth. In them reside the potential for reweaving mind and body. Knowledge and experience of these levels brings a new order of intelligence and insight that adds to one’s capacity to deal with life’s issues. Briefly, the Four Levels are:

Sensory/Physical: This level embraces the physical aspects of our own body: sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste.

Psychological/Personal History: Here reside the emotions and inner workings that make creativity central to our lives, and provide the opportunity to tap our own talents and gifts.

Mythic/Symbolic: Each of us is the living connection between the great stories of all times and places and the playing out of these stories in everyday life. Seeing and understanding our stories gives us access to a whole new range of possibilities.

Unitive/Integral Level: The deepest level of our development. All over the world, in many times and places there are traditions which hold that each human being contains a center or an inner essence, a link to the origin of the Universe and indeed to the entire Universe itself, that can be nurtured into a fully matured expression of itself. This state of existence has many names, such as True Self, Higher Being, the Divine, Spirituality, or Destiny.

Stay tuned for ways to develop the levels to enhance your health and wellbeing!

Stress Relief

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Stress – everywhere. Seems like kindness is being pushed down and out, replaced by anger, rudeness and hate. What to do?

Today, the rescue remedy I offer is an excerpt from A Sleep of Prisoners, a 1951 verse play by Christopher Fry.

Fry dramatically investigates the problems of four men, prisoners of war, locked up in a church in enemy territory. Personal and general conflicts become explosive to the point that one soldier loses his temper and half-strangles his friend.

The play is an incisive exploration into how people see themselves, each other, and the struggles of the world to find meaning and to progress. May these words touch your heart and inspire you as they do me:

The human heart can go the lengths of God…
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake…
But will you wake, for pity’s sake?

Feel free to share your thoughts and reflections. 

Here’s some music and natural beauty inspired by Fry’s words: